The enigma of Francesca Woodman and the extraordinary art she left behind

During the cold late spring of 1981, family and friends gathered in New York for a memorial service in honour of photographer Francesca Woodman. The artist had taken her own life at 22, following a long struggle with depression. Copies of a small book of her strange, theatrical photographs, titled Some Disordered Interior Geometries, were handed out. The work had been published just a few weeks before; it was the only one she saw in print.

Largely unknown and fitfully exhibited during her lifetime, Woodman’s oeuvre of some 800 photographs has been one of the great reclamations of 20th-century photography. We now recognise her influence in the work of photographers Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle, who would have been her contemporaries, while a burgeoning number of gallery shows, museum retrospectives and publications since the mid-1990s have made her into a cult figure. Copies of that artist’s book, originally on sale for $9, now go for more than $15,000. Her death has kept any sense of how her work might have matured a mystery, and the photographs she made as a young woman (she began experimenting with photography at the age of 13) have been obsessively pored over in the search for answers.

They don’t give up their mysteries easily. Each time you look, you seem to see more.

While a good number of the hundreds of prints Woodman created have been exhibited, her artist books, eight of them in total, remain a fascinating but shadowy part of the story. Aside from Geometries, the books have barely been seen, held deep in the archives of The Woodman Family Foundation in New York, never printed. In May, publisher Mack produced a long-awaited volume collecting them all. As well as offering a sense of how her practice deepened and developed during her productive final years, they emphasise how much her art gains from intimacy. The photographs Woodman made hold their own on the gallery wall, but there’s something about the book format — the hint of personal confessional, the sense of suspense and surprise as you turn the pages, the private dialogue between artist and reader — that makes you feel that you’re being given access to secrets that others are not privy to. They beckon you into her world.

Seven out of the eight books were created using yellowing schoolbooks and notepads Woodman found in flea markets and bookshops in Rome, while on a year out from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1978. Into pages dense with poems and lists scribbled by their former owners, maths exercises and accounting ledgers, she placed her own monochrome, medium-format prints, experimenting with composites of images and words. Portraits, Friends, Equations, seemingly one of her first books, is made from a 19th-century notebook filled with copperplate navigational algebra and diagrams, to which Woodman added portraits of her Italian friends, nude or in costume, and of her own figure dancing in front of a huge window, as if playing with her own summations of people and objects.

In later books, we see the growing influence of surrealism (there are nods to Dora Maar’s suspended limbs, Man Ray’s confrontational nudes, Claude Cahun’s costumes and Eva Hesse’s delicate sculptures), as well as a mastery of photographic trickery (figures or shapes blurred by slow shutter speeds, deliberate under- or overexposure heightened in the darkroom, brilliantly off-kilter framing). Initially, Woodman seems to have simply arranged pre-existing photographs within these pages, as if curating miniature exhibitions. But as time went on, she started making photographs in direct response to the images and shapes she saw.

Echoing the geometric shapes and explanatory equations printed on the pages of a maths textbook, Geometries presents 16 carefully composed still-life photographs containing squares, ellipses and triangles. In one print, Woodman’s disembodied hand rests on the surface of what appears to be a round stool, holding a child’s white glove. We notice the curved form of the stool catching the light, the pleasing visual echo between the hand and the glove; but there’s also a sense of unease. Whose is the hand? Where is the child? In another, we see her standing on a mirror, naked from the waist down, the sharp angles of the glass reflecting the curves of her form. Pieces of fabric and clothes tessellate a jigsaw at her feet. Alongside the pictures, there are phrases in Woodman’s blocky handwriting: “the mirror is a sort of rectangle”, “another rectangle”, “almost a square”.

Suzanne Horvitz, who co-published Geometries, remembers looking at the proposal for the book with her colleague when it arrived at their newly founded Synapse Press in 1980. “She [was] mirroring things on the page,” says Horvitz. They were both struck that, despite the fact that Woodman had barely left art college, the project was so fully formed. “It all comes together: the old geometry book, the new images, the handwritten annotations. We didn’t even question it. We just thought, this is perfect.”

In a diary entry written while she was working on the book, Woodman said simply, “I made my own geometries.” Which is how it reads: like an experiment in shape and form and composition, an exercise in finding her own space. The geometry book offers dry-as-dust problems; she responds by making her own puzzles.

It all comes together: the old geometry book, the new images, the handwritten annotations. We didn’t even question it. We just thought, this is perfect

Alongside these formal mathematical exercises, other images invite us into bleaker worlds and spaces — a hint of the “disorder” in the title. One image portrays a female figure sitting in a chair wearing an antique lace nightgown, her hands clutched to her body. A drizzle of white paint leaks across the floor like blood. Horvitz says she was struck by another image near the front of the book, in which Woodman captures her arm flung across her face in what might be fear or despair; an object is stuffed in her mouth. “I find that one hard to look at,” Horvitz says. “I’ve always thought that whatever she has in her mouth is stifling a scream.”

The photographs are narratively rich in themselves, but her experiments in sequencing point towards her burgeoning desire to explore moving images, which she had started to do. In a grant application from around the same time, Woodman wrote that “looking at these slides of pages is a sort of looking at stills from a film”, and the pictures do seem to tell a fragmented story. The white gloves appear several times, then disappear; we see the same battered wooden chair and piece of studio wall, a kind of set. Woodman herself flits in and out of view, wearing baroque costumes or nothing at all. The pictures feel like stop-motion stills from a psychodrama where the plot is never fully revealed.

Was she describing her own interior life in these images? Horvitz says it’s hard to say: “I have always wondered if it was a metaphor for how she was feeling.” For herself, she is simply pleased that the book made it into the world while the artist was still alive. Seeing it again after all this time reminds her how careful Woodman’s work was, how painstaking, how much she was in control of what she was making. “We were so happy that we were able to do it,” Horvitz says. “We were able to help her as an artist.”

In the four decades since Woodman’s death, many have searched for an answer to the enigmas she presents. Do her photographs foreshadow what was to come — or is that a clumsy overreading? Perhaps the better question is: what kind of artist might she have been had she lived? But then the pictures, somewhat brilliantly, don’t offer a clear answer; wherever you look in these pages, Woodman is in frame, but never quite in clear view. Sometimes she vanishes altogether. Catch her if you can.

Francesca Woodman, “The Artist’s Books” is published by Mack, mackbooks.co.uk

Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first